I came across a pic on reddit of an old device that required people to put a dime into a slot in order to ring your doorbell. If it was a friend, you could refund the dime. If it was a sales person, you could keep it.
Of course you could always just knock on the door which defeats the purpose but I was thinking:
What would be better is a service that acts as a go-between for phone calls.. people agree to pay you 25 cents to call you. You can choose to refund if you like at some point during the call by pressing a code..
What do you think? I just got my 4th telemarketing call of the day.
I have seen suggestions that the best way to end email spam would be to charge the sender, say, 1/10 of a cent to send an email.
Many would never go for that, but I think that if a network developed that policy, I might go with it: that would have to filter out a lot of the irrelvant spam, plus maybe some of my friends wouldn't send that goofy junk mail four and five times a day.
Well, if caller ID were free, it would save me alot of trouble. I currently pay less than $10 for my home phone.. if I were to add caller ID, etc., my average bill balloons past $20 a month!
I have an answering machine but most people, even friends, do not like to leave messages.
I just got my Skype cordless phone in the mail.. hopefully that will solve some problems. I can get risd of my landline as I have unlimited US and Canada calls thru Skype.
Rogue, that could work - but it would require all email providers and SMTP servers to adopt such a policy. For example, if yahoo, hotmail, and suchlike started charging, people could just telnet to an SMTP server and send their email like that for free, since (most) SMTP servers don't require a log in, someone could just specify their hotmail/whatever address as the from address giving the receiver the illusion it was sent through hotmail/something.
man, i have to say that this stuff with telemarketing i only saw in movies...where i'm from that is non existant...some people can have weeks before the phone rings..and when it rings is from friends and family usually
it's a great way to monetize your unsolicited phone calls, in here people from tv shopping networks call our phone like 6 times a day everyday, see. i hope phone companies will think about this as well.